Read The Welsh Girl Online

Authors: Peter Ho Davies

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #War & Military

The Welsh Girl (6 page)

BOOK: The Welsh Girl
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"You shouldn't have to put up with it," Colin goes on, but she shrugs. Jack's still keeping an eye out. It's a small village. She doesn't want talk.

"Anyhow," she says, "thank you, sir."

"Don't mention it, miss," he tells her, getting it finally, but still a little peeved.

She wipes down the bar, drops Harry's dirty glasses in the sink. She finds herself feeling a little sorry for the old soak.

Mary has told her he's lost his wife. "Songbird, she was. Big, warm voice. They met on the circuit, but you could see she

was always going to be a star. Got her first top billing for a tour of the Continent in '39, but then the war come and she never made it back. You wouldn't think to look at him, but it was true love." It makes Esther wonder. She's heard Harry telling jokes about his wife on the show: the missus; 'er indoors; the

trouble-and-strife. "Show
biz!
" Mary told her with a grim,

exaggerated brightness. "The show must go on and all that." The clock strikes ten-thirty. "
Amser, boneddigion. Amser,

diolch yn fawr
," Jack cries, clanging the bell, and Esther

chimes in, "Time, gents. Last orders, please."

Two
S

he rinses glasses while Jack locks up, pouring the dregs away, twisting each glass once around the bristly scrub

brush. They come out of the water with a little belch and she sets them on the rack. Normally she'd stay to dry and polish them, but Jack says it's enough. "Only gonna get dirty again tomorrow." He reaches over her to switch off the radio, and she realises with a little flush that she's been swaying to the muted band music.

"It's all right," she says. "I'll see to these." But he takes the towel from her and nods at the door. She wonders if he knows.

In the porch, she pauses to check her reflection in the leaded panes, pats the curls that have loosened in the damp air of the pub, reties her scarf around her neck. Colin likes to tease her about the national dress, the scarlet shawl and tall black hat that Welsh women wear on all the postcards. "Where's your topper?" he asks. "Why don't you put on that nice red cloak, give us a twirl?" She likes the attention, but she wouldn't be caught dead in such an outfit--the women on the cards look like severe dolls to her, part Red Riding Hood, part Puritan. As a girl she'd asked her father with shy earnestness what the men's national dress was, and he'd snapped there wasn't one. The asymmetry still bothers her obscurely.

She catches herself frowning in the glass, forces a smile and immediately relaxes it. They called her 'big mouth' at school, mostly for speaking up, she knows, but she's always been self-conscious about her strong jaw and too-wide grin.

She once begged Mary to show her how to use make-up, but the actress shook her head gently. "Not with the bloom on you, luv." It had made Esther blush more than any compliment from Colin or Rhys, and she clings to it now for confidence as she plucks the colour into her cheeks before leaving the porch.

Outside, the threatened storm has blown out over the Irish Sea, and the night is clear, blue-black and speckled with stars above the denser dark of the mountains.

Colin is waiting for her round the corner.

"Eh up!" he calls softly, appearing from the shadows of the hedge and pulling her to him.

He'd been waiting for her here one night last month, when they'd kissed for the first time. He'd lit a cigarette when she'd appeared, his face blooming in the darkness. She started towards him, towards the redness of his cigarette. "Give us one, then," she asked, and he offered the pack, pulled back when she reached for it, held it out again, then lifted it almost beyond reach so that she had to jump a little to snatch it from his hand. They'd smoked together in silence then, watching each other's pursed lips 'flushing and fading as they breathed in and out. She'd been glad of the grown-up feel of the cigarette's light, fragile cylinder between her fingers, and then all too quickly he'd finished his, flicking the glowing stub over his shoulder, and she'd drawn on hers hurriedly, sucking herself into a coughing fit until he had to pat her back. She could still feel the imprint of his hand, the ringing shudder of his slaps. There'd been an awkward moment when he could have offered her another but didn't, and then they'd been kissing. He tasted exactly like the cigarette, except for his

moustache, which smelled damp, muddy even. But she'd liked it. They've met here every night since. Tonight she's promised to go somewhere more private with him.

She's been kissed before, of course, though the only boy she's kissed lately is little Jim, a soppy smooch to make him

blush on his twelfth birthday. Just seventeen, but she reckons she's acquitted herself well with Colin, even surprised him a little. She was wary of his questions about her age at first, tried to be mysterious and mock-offended--"You can't ask a girl that! I've my own secrets to keep"--but the way he'd laughed had made her feel small, childish. "I pull your pints, don't I?" she told him. "There's laws, you know. Can't have kids serving in a pub." But he wasn't convinced, and so she kissed him back, the way she's learned from the pictures, lips crushed together. It had been just as she'd imagined, until she'd felt Colin's tongue slipping against her own and she'd pulled back in surprise. He'd laughed and called it French kissing. "More like English cheek," she'd told him tartly, sticking her own tongue out for good measure, but then she'd smiled, leaned into him again, pushing up on her toes and opening her lips as if for a morsel.

"Mmm!" Golin says now as they separate. "There's a girl. You just hold that pretty thought." He puts a cigarette between his lips, lights it and passes it to her. "So's I can find you in the dark," he tells her, stepping back into the gloom.

"Colin?" she whispers.

He leans his face back into the faint light of the cigarette. "Hang on a sec, luv. Got to fetch the magic carpet if I'm going to whisk you away from all this, ain't I?"

She puffs on her cigarette, imagining she can taste him, exhales. The local girls have started calling her 'the youngest old maid' behind her back, but she's suddenly relieved she's never had much to do with the village boys. The ones her age are mostly off now, joined up or making good money in factories or in the coal mines down south. Even before they left, though, her mother's death had isolated her from the other young folk in the village. She'd had to leave school to help her father--over the pleas of her teachers, who'd always told her she was destined for better things, secretarial college

perhaps--and made up for the loss of her childhood by priding herself on being grown up, an air the other girls had been quick to pick up on and resent. In truth, though, she'd never been much drawn to the local boys--her one youthful dalliance had been with Eric, their first evacuee--even when they'd been interested in her. Rhys Roberts was a case in point.

He and Esther had been born within a month of each other, and their mothers had become fast friends, though Arthur viewed Rhys's father, Mervyn, a rockman at the quarry, with a mixture of jealousy and suspicion. The two women had both worked in service in Liverpool during their youths. "Though Viv was an
upstairs
maid, on account of her fine English,"

Esther's mother always acknowledged (her own pronunciation being marred by occasional slips--
umberella
for umbrella,
filum
for film).

When Mervyn had died in a quarry accident ten years earlier, the families had become even closer, Arthur going out of his way to help the widow of the man he'd snubbed, until Mrs Roberts was able to find work at the school. Rhys's mother had always been grateful for the help--Esther was sure it was one reason the famously fierce teacher had favoured her. And Rhys, too, had apparently felt in her debt, protecting her from the taunts of the other children who called her a teacher's pet, even when he was the one, the slow son of the schoolmistress, who suffered worst in comparison. After Esther's mother's death, Mrs Roberts had been at Cilgwyn every day for a week, quietly seeing to their meals and keeping the place going. Rhys had been solicitous too, in his clumsy way, as if he thought the loss of a parent connected them more. But Esther had resented the way he talked about Arthur, saying the words 'your father' reverently, as if in a prayer ("Your father who art in sheep pen," she used to whisper to herself), and he was always on about his mother, my mam this and my mam that, as if he were dangling Mrs

Roberts before her like a carrot. The fact that Esther
was
fond of her teacher, thrilled by her approval, only made Rhys's insistence, with its reminder of the lingering girlish crush she had on his mother, the more embarrassing. Once, Rhys asked her if she thought his mother and her father might marry, a suggestion she recoiled from, even more so than she recoiled from his more recent plan to unite their families.

The ratcheting tring of a bell announces the return of Colin, wheeling a bicycle before him. "Your carriage awaits!" She'd been hoping for a jeep, but he is only a corporal. "Better than Shanks's pony," he tells her with a grin, clambering on to the saddle and wrestling the bike around for her to perch on the handlebars. She feels self-conscious raising her bum on to the frame, aware of him watching, but then they're off.

Colin pedals firmly. She can feel the bike vibrating with his effort as they near the brow of the hill behind the pub, and then her stomach turns over as they start to coast down the far side. Soon they're flying, laughing in the darkness. The wind presses her skirt to her legs, then catches it, flipping the hem up against her waist. Her slip slides up her legs, billows in the breeze as if remembering its past life as a parachute, and her knees and then one white thigh flash in the starlight. She

wants to lean down to fix it, but Colin has her hands pressed under his on the handlebars, and when she wriggles he tells her, "Hold still, luv. I've got you."

She has never been to Sunnyvale, the old holiday camp, but she remembers, as a child before the war, seeing posters showing all the fun to be had there: pictures of cheerful tots and bathing beauties by the pool. Arthur recalls when the camp was the site of finishing sheds for the quarried slate, when the lane leading to it was a track for freight wagons bringing the great slabs off the mountain. The rails had still been visible farther up, beyond the camp, until '39, when they'd been hauled away for scrap. They're probably part of a

tank now, Esther thinks, or a battleship, miles away from where they started. The camp itself had opened in the twenties as a hiking base--a favourite pastime in these parts since the Ladies of Llangollen popularised it in their diary-- and enjoyed a brief boom after Mallory stayed there while training in Snowdonia. But his disappearance on Everest, coupled with the Depression, had ended the camp's first period of prosperity, and the war had put paid to its second, after it reopened in the late thirties with much-trumpeted improvements, like a children's playground and the swimming pool.

On hot summer days, gathering the flock from the hillside above, running to keep up with her father's long, loose stride, Esther would steal glances at the faceted blue gem of water below her and imagine its coolness. But such places aren't for locals. Even in better days, the most her father could afford was the odd day trip on a growling charabanc to Rhyl or Llandudno. Besides, as he used to tell her, "Who needs a

pool when there's the ocean for free?" But she hates the sea, the sharp salt taste, the clammy clumps of seaweed. She's only ever seen swimming pools at the pictures, but for her that other Esther, Esther Williams, is the most beautiful woman in the world (Welsh to boot, judging by her name). She'd seen
Bathing Beauty
three times that spring.

So as soon as Colin coasts through the back gates of the old camp, she asks him to show her the pool. He looks a little surprised--probably has one of the empty, mildewed chalets in mind--but something in her voice, her eagerness, convinces him. He props the bike in the shadows behind a dark hut and leads her through the kids' playground. She clambers up the slide and swishes down on her backside, arms outstretched.

He studies her from the roundabout, circling slowly. There's a watchful quality in him, as if he's waiting for something, the right moment, and the thought is delicious to her. When she

bats at the swings, he calls softly, "Want a push?" and she tells him throatily, "Yeah."

She settles herself, and he puts his hands in the small of her back and shoves firmly to set her off, and then as she swings he touches her lightly, his fingers spread across her hips, each time she passes. "Go on!" she calls, and he pushes her harder and harder, until she sees her shiny toe tops rising over the indigo silhouette of the encircling mountains. When she finally comes to a stop, the strands of dark hair that have flown loose fall back and cover her face. She tucks them away, all but one, which sticks to her cheek and throat, an inky curve. He reaches for it and traces it, and she takes his hand for a second, then pushes it away. He's on the verge of something, but she doesn't want him to come out with it just yet, not until it's perfect.

"I saw the pool from up there," she tells him breathlessly and she pulls him towards it. She can see the water, the choppy surface, and she wants, just once, to recline beside it and run her hand through it. But when she gets close and bends down, she sees that what she has taken for the surface of the water is an old tarpaulin stretched over the mouth of the pool. She strikes at it bad-temperedly, as if it spoils everything.

"For leaves and that," Colin says, catching up. "So it doesn't get all mucky."

"But what about the water?" "Suppose they drained it."

He can see her disappointment, but he isn't discouraged.

He looks like he'd relish making it up to her.

"Come 'ere," he says, taking her hand and pulling her along to the metal steps that drop into the pool.

He kneels and unfastens the cloth where it's tied to the edge by guy ropes. "Follow me." He climbs down, his feet, his legs, his torso disappearing until she can see only the top of

BOOK: The Welsh Girl
6.95Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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